1 Introduction
Consumer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) continues to be a fast-growing discipline within Identity and Access Management (IAM), emerging in the last few years to meet evolving business requirements. Many businesses and public sector organizations are finding that they must provide better digital experiences for and gather more information about the consumers who are using their services. Enterprises want to collect, store, and analyze data on consumers to create additional sales opportunities and increase brand loyalty.
To reduce money laundering, cyber-crime, terrorist financing, and fraud, regulators are requiring banks and financial service providers to put into place mechanisms for “Knowing Your Customer”. Having IAM systems dedicated to hosting consumer identities and their associated profiles is a good first step toward KYC.
CIAM systems can aid in other types of regulatory compliance. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, collecting clear and unambiguous consent from consumers for the use of their data is necessary for compliance. Many CIAM solutions provide this capability, plus offer consumers dashboards to manage their information sharing choices. Moreover, CIAM systems can help corporate customers implement consistent privacy policies and provide the means to notify users when terms change and then collect acknowledgement.
The Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2) in the EU will require banks, financial institutions, and other payment service providers to offer strong customer authentication (SCA) and perform user behavioral analysis to authenticate and authorize monetary transactions. Sophisticated CIAM solutions can provide these necessary functions. Additionally, the improved customer experience possibilities that CIAM offers will facilitate brand loyalty and give a competitive advantage to those financial companies that deploy it. The Regulatory Technical Specifications (RTS) of PSD2 will be tested in March 2019 with full implementation in September 2019.
Common features of Consumer Identity solutions include:
- Self-registration for customers, usually via social network registration
- Consent mechanisms for users to control the use of their data
- Single Sign-On (SSO) across related digital properties
- Multiple authentication options for customers, depending on risks and policies
- Customer profile storage, governance, and orchestration
- SaaS application integration
- Fine-grained access control to resources and data
SAP Customer Data Cloud is a leading CIAM solution offered by SAP. SAP acquired Gigya in 2018. Gigya had developed its SaaS-based Identity Enterprise platform to address deficiencies in traditional IAM solutions that made it difficult for organizations to offer digital services to consumers. Since the acquisition completed, SAP has combined Gigya’s Customer Identity and Access Management Platform and its Enterprise Preference Management solution and renamed the complete offering SAP Customer Data Cloud. They have continued to develop and extend the service with the help of SAP’s global resources. Moreover, they are creating tighter integrations with existing SAP products, services, and partners.
